. . . you need to go back to the Clinton administration, which decidedthat everybody and his kid brother was entitled to a mortgage even whenthey didn't begin to qualify for a home loan."In saner days, banks designated certain areas as no-loan zones-- depressed neighborhoods where lending money to potential home buyerswas not just a risky investment, but a certain future foreclosure.Critics of the practice called it "redlining", and President Clintonand his chums on Capitol Hill decided that banks should no longer actlike banks and lend money only to home buyers who could afford tohandle the monthly payments. Now all bets would be off and people notthe least bit creditworthy -- and speculators -- would be entitled bylaw to obtain mortgages even when it was obvious they couldn't afford tohandle them.

Enter those now infamous quasi-government banking instruments knownas Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which poured fresh money into thebanking system by buying mortgages from banks. Over the long haul theymanaged to load up their portfolios with billions upon billions ofdollars of risky mortgage paper that banks had been forced to offer andthen dumped on them.

The scandal of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac dwarfs the Enron debacle. InEnron, people went to jail. With the Fannies, some just walked away withmillions. The collapse of Lehman Brothers can be blamed on Fannie Maeand Freddie Mac, the two big mortgage banks that the Feds recentlybailed out withbig bucks. As Fox News has pointed out, they used huge lobbyingbudgets and political contributions to keep regulators off theirbacks. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the top three U.S.Senators getting big Fannie and Freddie political bucks were Democrats,and No. 2 was Sen. Barack Obama who, as Fox noted, had only been in theSenate four years but still managed to grab that No. 2 spot ahead oflongtime colleagues John Kerry and Chris Dodd, the chairman of theSenate Banking Committee.

According to Fox, Fannie and Freddie were where big-time WashingtonDemocrats went to work and pocketed millions. Franklin Raines, Clinton'sWhite House Budget Director, ran Fannie and collected $50 million. JamieGorelick, an official in Clinton's Justice Department -- the woman whobuilt the "wall" that prevented the FBI from targetingterrorists before 9/11 -- worked for Fannie Mae and took home $26million. Big-time Democrat Jim Johnson, who headed Obama's VP searchcommittee, also hauled in millions from running Fannie Mae.

Obama brazenly blames John McCain and the GOP for the current WallStreet mess when it's clear none of it was due to Republican policies.The truth of the matter is that it was McCain and three GOP colleagueswho sought to reform the government's lending policies three long yearsago after the Bush administration had failed two years earlier. On May25, 2006, McCain spoke on behalf of the Federal Housing EnterpriseRegulatory Reform Act of 2005 and warned against the debacle we are nowfacing if it failed to pass.

He told the Senate that a report by the Office of Federal HousingEnterprise Oversight charged that "Fannie Mae employees deliberately andintentionally manipulated financial reports to hit earnings targets inorder to trigger bonuses for senior executives. McCain warned, "IfCongress does not act, American taxpayers willcontinue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and FreddieMac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and theeconomy as a whole."

McCain predicted the entire collapse we now are suffering through.He stressed the falsification of financial records to benefitexecutives, including Obama advisers Franklin Raines and Jim Johnson.

Now Obama has the nerve to try to pin the blame on McCain and theGOP when the facts show that the blame must be pinned on the Democraticdonkey.